About

What is the game?

Contact Vector is a strategy game set in space, playable as a real time strategy game and as a simultaneous turn based game.

We want to create a game focused on strategy and tactics that will be about maneuvering your ships and setting up the best formations to out fight your enemy.

Stretch Goal Update!

After receiving feedback by our backers we have decided to adjust our stretch goals.

Single player seems to be important to people and its also something we really want to see. Because of this we have decided to refocus and move it up our priority list. We will try our best to create a single player skirmish AI for you to play against. This will be listed as a stretch goal at 130.000

We will do our best when funded to create this even if we don’t manage to reach the stretch goal funding.

Rewards Update

We have noticed that some of you wanted to have two copies of the game so we have adjusted the midshipman reward to reflect this. You will now get 2 copies of the game. This carries through as normal so any rewards above that would have got one copy will now also get two.

Try our demo:

Our demo lets you get a peak at the kind of style we are going for. You can fire missiles and track them into there targets and watch them defend themselves. This is still very early and will definitely improve in terms of quality.

Real Time Or Turn Based

It seemed to us that players wanting a deeper level of game play and more depth would like more time to think about their moves than is possible in a real time game. To this end we want to allow you to set regular pauses in the game that give you more time to give orders to your fleet.

Why we want to make this game?

Many space games focus on empire building or piloting ships, we wanted a game that focuses on fleet command. Where tactics and strategy are key but unit and base production are not. This isn’t the kind of game big developers are producing and in coming to kickstarter we hope to bring together a community of players who want design and play with us.

Why you will want to play this game

If you want an RTS where how you use your units is more important than how fast you can produce them, then this is the game for you.

How you achieve victory is up to you!

Deploy and lead your task group in system wide combat against your opponents where the outcome is determined by your ability and fleet tactics. Use long and close range combat, sneak up on your enemy and trick them into looking for you in the wrong places.

MULTIPLAYER/SINGLEPLAYER

The initial release of contact vector will be a multiplayer game. Because we think this will offer players the most enjoyable and challenging games. You will be able to setup and search for players and choose different scenarios to play out.

We are really keen to create a single player game and have plans for one. The reason this is a stretch goal and not a main objective is the difficulty involved in writing a genuinely good AI.

Contact Vector in a nutshell

The basic game play in Contact Vector is controlling groups of ships. It’s about how, where and when you choose to fight. You will be able to customize load outs for long and short range weapon systems to accommodate your tactics.

The weapon ranges will overlap, but typically certain ranges will favour missiles or energy weapons.

WEAPONS

Missile combat is usually the longest range type of enemy engagement. You will have to choose what type of missiles to use. Your firing position to best exploit your opponent’s blind spots. Long range firing solutions will seem attractive if only because they’re the most likely to keep your fleet concealed and out of harms way. But a longer missile run is more easily intercepted. How bold will you be and how much courage will you expect from your ships’ captains?

Energy weapons will vary, but compared to missiles they’re extremely short range weapons. If a large ship can slog its way through the missile storm and bring energy weapons to bear, there’s a good chance it can tear an enemy ship to pieces in seconds.

STEALTH

Stealth has a core role in Contact Vector tactics. The vastness of space is easy to hide in, but ship drives make anything that moves under power easier to see. But a moving signature could be anything, the trick is determining what.

SHIP DESIGNING

Ships will be customizable with components. These will be things like reactors, shield capacitors and armor, magazine size and weapons load outs. You will be able to change all around but must fit within the ship’s maximum tonnage.

COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT

We want to make early builds of the game and invite people to play them. It’s going to be very important to get a feel for the game and get your opinions about it. We really hope that you get excited about the game and also that you have ideas and feedback for us.

We are looking to make the core of the game simple enough that it’s flexible and allows changes and additions making it as fun to play as we can. This is where the community’s ideas and feedback are going to play a vital role.

We have planned to create a great multi-player experience but we have plans to try and add a raft of other features. As such we have a list of stretch goals.

FAQ

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Risks and challenges

Most of our significant challenges are technical. Some of them have already been solved in the game development literature and our experience in the games industry makes us feel we can meet some of our more novel challenges relatively easily.

Some of our movement planning and AI concepts are new territory so we're really cutting some new turf in our game. We're looking to the motion planning literature of robotics to solve and address some of the problems.

We want what you see on the screen in your plans to be an accurate representation of what the ships will actually do. For this, the physics has to be modeled in the movement plan and so planning must deal with our physics.

Because of this we have planned to create the features of the game in a way where we can adjust it to make sure that we complete the game and make it fun. This does mean that there is the possibility that features will change during development.

This is also why our stretch goals include things like a single player AI, we plan to work on this but its a really hard problem and we want to get it right. This is why we have chosen to focus on multiplayer first.

This is one of the reasons we are so keen to have you all involved in the design and playtesting to make sure its as good as we can make it.

Kickstarter is not a store.

Pledge £20 or more
About $26

Officer Cadet First Class:

The game + Beta Access + Early Access to DLC.
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All reward tiers above this one will also receive Beta Access and Early DLC Access.
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Kickstarter is not a store.

Pledge £200 or more
About $257

Rear Admiral

Skype Development Chats; be invited to special play sessions and development talks to chat about the game with us directly. This is a way for you to directly affect the development of contact vector You also get access to all future content and games we make for free!